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Posts Tagged → personal

February 8th, 2023

Are you in a cattle chute or a professional funnel? Yes, you are

Because LinkedIn had driven me away years ago with their need to control everything I said about myself, I left and did not return until today. Not that I wanted to return to LinkedIn, but because the two people I was trying to reach for professional purposes left me, and their prospective audience, no other way to reach them. Their only presence on the Internet is through LinkedIn.

Turns out that even when I re-registered on LinkedIn, I still cannot reach the two people who advertise there, because they have no contact information published. Like no phone number, no website, no email, not even a FakeBook page listed. So I am left with the option of inviting them to connect to my LinkedIn page, or, for a fee, messaging them through LinkedIn. No other way to reach these people, because they do not have their own websites, and they do not advertise anywhere else on the Internet.

Because I value my privacy and I desire to keep my business work to myself, I decline to use the messaging functions on most social media companies, like LinkedIn. Myriad reports about social media companies’ staffers reading, manipulating, editing, acting on, and deleting people’s “private” messages indicate that using these functions comes with a high risk. You certainly don’t want to engage in anything personal through these messages that you would be embarrassed about in public. Because if a company employee feels like anonymously divulging your “secret” and “private” communications to the public, they can and will. Plenty of evidence of it.

So LinkedIn has these two people’s careers and livelihoods and even their personal lives by the throat, because they are in a cattle chute or a funnel. LinkedIn controls literally everything digital about them. And I imagine that many, if not most other LinkedIn users, are in the same boat.

The only way to actually benefit from using LinkedIn is if everyone literally buys into their whole package deal and submits to LinkedIn’s total control over your communications and networking. However, as we have seen in recent months, LinkedIn monitors every word its users say to one another, even in private messages, and some words (most of which are a mystery until a user steps on them and sets them off like the hidden land mine they are) are such huge no-no’s that people have had their LinkedIn account summarily suspended, indefinitely and without clear reason or evidence why.

And if your LinkedIn account is summarily suspended, and you have no other means of advertising yourself, no other way for people to find you and reach you, then you are basically canceled and do not exist. You literally are in virtual suspended animation. And now that there is cooperation or collusion between LinkedIn and other social media platforms, if you get suspended on one, you get suspended on the others. You can say just one “wrong” word on one social media platform and end up virtually unknown and unreachable on the Internet overnight. Your entire market presence is gone.

Something similar is afoot with Microsoft, where your laptop is no longer yours and yours alone. Now, unless you aggressively ward off all of their nonstop funneling and controlling efforts, you must sign in to your own computer through Microsoft. Microsoft controls your access to your own personally owned machine. It is a digital filter, a limitation, a brake, a collar, a control on how and when and under what terms you access your own laptop computer. And just because you said “No” to Microsoft’s cattle chute fifty times before does not mean that Microsoft won’t keep trying to funnel you into their control. The company will keep on trying to shunt you into their own login system so that they become the gatekeeper of your own personal computer that you paid for with your money. I myself do not need or want a gatekeeper over access to my work machine. That spooks me, because I need full control of my work and my digital life.

The gatekeeper function and corralling effect is a bad deal and I don’t accept it. I want full manual control over my computer and over my life. I do not understand how or why Americans allowed themselves to be corralled this way, their entire persona and professional presence centralized and controlled by someone else. Why they have allowed themselves to be put into a cattle chute or into a professional digital funnel, where the only way forward is the one given to you by some digital overlord in Silicon Valley, California. Usually that overlord is a twenty-something inexperienced kid with a computer chip in their hand and a hair trigger bad attitude chip on their shoulder.

What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, by the way, Steve Steen and Becky Geer, if either of you are interested in doing the OGM abstracting LinkedIn says you want to do, contact me. Right here.

 

By Josh • Posted in Fruit of Contemplation • No Comment
January 24th, 2023

The beautiful power of a free market guitar

A lot of the recent discussion and reporting about the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is how hard the participants there are trying to centralize decision making, to aggregate power into as few hands as possible, and to control the choices that individual people have available to them all around the world. This effort to concentrate power and decision making in the hands of elites runs opposite and directly against the democratic forms of government that many people around the globe have fought and died to achieve.

Places like India, France, Britain, Israel, South Korea, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, the Philippines, and of course my home country of America, have all offered their citizens a maximum amount of personal freedom and opportunity. People living there can make all kinds of choices about what they want to read, to say, to wear, to eat, what kind of job they want to try, what kinds of products they want to try and create and sell. And that last part, the creating and selling part, is really at the heart of democracy. Because free markets offer choices not just in economic spheres, but which naturally blend into our own personal lives.

When a person, you the reader here, for instance, feels personally fulfilled by fully following your natural talent and curiosity, and by fulfilling your creative spirit, often also followed by greatly improving your physical living conditions, then you become a maximally happy person. This pursuit of happiness is one of the main reasons that America exists, and it is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. A nation filled with happy people is a miracle, because it is so rare in human history. So we see that free markets create the most happy, most fulfilled individuals, who are creative, educated, and opinionated.

And we also see with the WEF that the wealthiest people on Planet Earth are now scheming and trying to take that happiness away. The WEF people do not want “little people” individuals to make their own decisions. Instead, they want centralized decision making for all of us, by a very small number of ultra wealthy people. They do not support democracy or free choice or you having an opinion that threatens their power.

I want to share a neat related video with you. To me it is powerful because it touches on this subject of an individual who follows his dream to make the best guitars possible within the free markets that the world allows. He succeeds within the international guitar market, but because of a natural resource constraint – the almost complete loss of ebony trees, necessary for making guitar necks and frets – he takes a big risk, makes some big sacrifices, and ends up playing an even bigger and more positive role in the world.

Bob Taylor, of Taylor Guitars, uses careful market-driven management of rare ebony trees and their surrounding forests to create the conditions necessary for conserving the vast African rainforest jungle those trees grow in. When the local people no longer need to poach ebony trees to sell on the black market, they become protectors of the ebony trees. Economics and free markets keep ebony trees alive, and growing for the future, as well as the richly diverse jungle habitat in which ebony trees grow. This is powerful stuff only achievable by free markets.

The same dynamic is also at play with trophy hunting in Africa, where wealthy hunters pay much more to kill wild game than that same animal is worth as bush meat to the local populations. Because the locals get the meat from the trophy animal (99% of the trophy animal is immediately donated to locals, the hunter and the safari camp getting the other 1%) anyhow, and they also get the hunting and tourism-related jobs from the international visitors who want to see and hunt wildlife, the incentive shifts away from poaching and market hunting to the locals then protecting and conserving the wild game they once saw only as a meal. Again, powerful natural resource conservation as a direct result of free markets.

Long live free markets, personal choice, personal accountability, and personal reward for hard work and risk taking. May the World Economic Forum fail in its effort to end our choices and to make us “own nothing.”

Here is the Taylor Guitar video. I hope it speaks to you like it speaks to me.

(and here is the ten years later video, which is about ebony tree planting and husbandry)

By Josh • Posted in Fruit of Contemplation • No Comment
August 29th, 2018

You are damn right I still support President Trump

Despite a howling mob’s best effort to obfuscate, harangue, punish, slow down and hamstring the president of the United States, I still strongly support him.

What broken third-world country do we live in where otherwise normal everyday Americans boast about being in “the resistance” against their own president?! Are they running a guerilla civil war against the country?

Can you imagine if these were conservative militia members saying this about a president in the other political party? The uproar that would follow!

This shameful notion that liberal activists as well as average Democrats have about “resisting” a legally elected president of their own nation is incredibly harmful to our nation. All the foolish talk about our electoral system being compromised by “Russia” hurts the integrity of our electoral system, because it undermines people’s trust in it.

And yet none of these liberals wants voter ID, none want the local voter rolls to be purged and verified. Oh no no no, that would remove too many fake voters from the rolls!

One of the reasons I support President Trump is that, by and large, I agree with his choices and policies. Certainly not all of them, but definitely the preponderance. There are some policies and actions I think his administration could do better, like in the environmental and resource conservation fields. More nuance, more refined distinctions, more sophisticated analysis. But like with any other elected official, you learn to take the good with the bad, and with this particular elected official I believe we have much more good than bad. This president is running a net Positive. America is booming!

Another reason I support President Trump is that he is standing strong amid a withering personal crusade against him, his children, his grandchildren, his wife, his in-laws, his friends, his business associates, his business partners, his employees, his friends, his neighbors, and everyone else who has any sort of association with him. It is meant to punish him and everyone he cares about. Just for him being him.

This ridiculous attack is way outside the normal scope of American politics. It is unprecedented. It is unfair. It is evil and disgusting. If it were Obama, or Clinton getting this same treatment, you couldn’t get away with it for ten seconds.

For me and I think a lot of Americans like me, this very personal and destructive assault on President Trump is an attack on basic American decency and on our system of government. No one in public service should be subjected to this. Certainly that is what some people argued about president Bill Clinton, when he was caught having sex with women in the White House and then lying to cover it up.

People who win elections should get to carry on with their work. That is the way our system works. Is supposed to work.

That the media have been corrupted into this crusade only cements my view that this treatment of our American President is simply unjustified and wrong, enabled by the corruption of the First Amendment.

That Hollywood actors feel free to use the most vulgar language against the person who was elected to represent our country means that they, the Hollywood people, are that low vulgar quality. It does not mean anything about the person they are aiming at. Hollywood and its actors are really in the smelly gutter. Makes you wonder why you went to see their stupid movies in the past. Why should we enable such infantile jerks?

All of this mistreatment has only hardened my resolve for President Trump to stay in office and succeed.

So when people ask me “Josh, do you still support President Trump?,” I say “You are damned right I support President Trump!”

To Hell and back.

By Josh • Posted in Government Of the People... • No Comment